Free Rein

'Damn, he's basically got a perfect account of everything I've been up to.

'It makes sense when I think about it, though. I did leave all those monsters' corpses just lying around after I took their magic stones. It's not like I went to the trouble of burying them either. Of course Zenof was bound to hear of this, being the Knight Captain and all.'

In light of everything that he had learned, the Knight Captain had come to doubt the reading from Allen's Appraisal Ceremony. There was no way he had low stats and no Talent. His three matches with Mihai—which Zenof had witnessed in person—had been more than enough to indicate that something was amiss.

So Zenof had summoned the clergymen who had handled Allen's Appraisal Ceremony to gain a more detailed account of what had happened at the time.

All of them firmly insisted that Allen had no Talent. But this raised another question.

This group of clergymen traveled throughout the kingdom every year, starting from the royal capital and stopping at various fiefdoms and villages on a specific route. The number of children that they had Appraised throughout the years was beyond counting, and yet, they somehow still remembered this one boy from so many years ago.

When the Knight Captain had queried the clergymen, they thought it strange as well and started to reexamine their memories more thoroughly.

This process ended up helping them recall the occasion in greater detail. The crystal used in the ceremony was supposed to glow in different ways depending on the child's Talent, but it had glowed so brightly for Allen that everyone present had to shut their eyes. Add in Allen's rare black hair and eyes, and little wonder the incident had remained vivid in their minds. The clergymen had nodded at each other's contributions to the conversation as if comparing answers while reconstructing the situation piece by piece.

Thanks to this, the memory of the head clergyman who had headed the ceremony was jogged and he was able to recall the reading on the pitch-black metallic plate. He retracted what he had said earlier about Allen not having a Talent, explaining that there had indeed been characters on the display, but that they had been illegible. This, combined with the low stat values, was what had led him to conclude it must have been some sort of error and to declare the boy Talentless.

"And it is thanks to that Talent that you've been able to kill so many monsters, yes?"

"Uh...yes, Sir."

"Mm."

The Knight Captain was now sure that Allen knew that he had a Talent despite having been declared Talentless and had kept quiet about it all this time.

'He's caught on... Is he going to ask me about my class? Not that I intend on telling him anything.'

Allen had every intention of glossing things over if pressed for details, but the Knight Captain never did ask him in the end. The two continued eating their meal while staring into the fire.

After a long silence, just as Allen looked up to peer at Zenof's face, the man said abruptly, "His Lordship already knows everything."

It was nearing the three-year mark of Allen's time at the Granvelle mansion, but as it turned out, the Baron had already known about him for quite a long time. In other words, he had allowed Allen free rein with full awareness of the boy's doings. Making him a huntsman so soon after he entered service had, aside from the demands from other servants and whatnot, been a conscious decision to go along with what Allen wanted.

"Why...would he go so far for me?" Allen asked, taken aback.

"Well...I'm sure you're curious, but it's not my place to say. His Lordship might share his thoughts with you directly one day. Lend him an ear then."

'"Lend him an ear"? That's a weird way of putting it. It almost sounds like he, a baron, might ask me, a mere manservant, for something.'

Zenof requested that Allen report to him on matters like his next targets and current progress whenever the Captain visited the mansion in the future, then fell silent again.

This, of course, made sense from his position. He and his men had gone to the trouble of making thorough preparations to fight a whole village of goblins only to arrive on-site and find it already razed to the ground and all the goblins dead.

Understandably, finding all their effort wasted would negatively affect the troop's morale, especially when it happened so many times.

After having been allowed to do as he pleased for so long, there was no way for Allen to refuse this request. So he agreed, after which Zenof nodded and grew silent once more.

In the end, he never did ask for details about the Summons or the way Allen usually spent his days.

***

After dinner was over, a knight came over to the fire where Zenof and Allen were warming themselves to report that preparations for the bath were complete. By bath, he was referring to a simple process of using a bucket of hot water for wiping off sweat and grime.

The Knight Captain immediately stood up and took off his armor right there. Remembering that he had yet to thank the man for saving his life, Allen offered to wipe his back.

He gasped when he saw the fifty-some-year-old's bare back—it was marred with countless scars, as befitted a veteran soldier of decades. Although the captain had plenty of scars on his arms and face, Allen had not imagined that it would be the same under his armor as well.

Allen then knelt down to wipe Zenof's back, wondering just how many life-and-death battles he had lived through. But when he got close enough to take a better look, he gasped once more. Many of the scars had been wounds so deep that large swathes of skin had been removed, revealing the muscles below. From the look of things, all of them had likely been near-fatal.

"Mm? What's the matter?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Sir. I will begin wiping now. Um, by the way..."

'These old wounds...are painful even to look at.'

"Yes?"

"I have recovery items that can probably heal you. Would you like me to use them?"

"I'm good."

"I have plenty of them, though."

"No, there's no need. Leave it."

"Y-Yes, Sir."

Allen had been thinking of using a Leaf of Life, but to his surprise, Zenof turned his offer down. The man apparently wanted to keep his scars. Allen fell silent and resumed wiping.

'Still, today's hunt was an utter failure. There's not much I can do when the orcs group up like they did today. Slowly pushing in is just a war of attrition, the worst strategy possible. And me entering the gate was a huge mistake too.' While diligently wiping the back before his eyes, Allen reflected on how today went.

Suddenly, the Knight Captain asked, "Do you find hunting fun?" almost as if he had read Allen's mind.

"Yes, Sir. It's incredibly fun."

"I see."

Silence returned between the two. There was a hint of sadness in Zenof's face, but Allen could not see it from his angle.

***

The next day, Allen finally returned to the mansion.

After explaining what had happened to Sebas, he was let off without a reprimand. All Sebas said was, "I'm glad you're back home safe."

This reaction was all Allen needed to realize that he really had been allowed to hunt as much as he wanted.

The reason still remained a mystery, though.

***

Two weeks passed, and it was now the end of May.

"GUUMOOOHHHHHHH!!!"

The orc king roared at the top of its lungs, then fell to the ground, bleeding profusely.

<You have defeated 1 orc king. You have earned 25,000 XP.>

'Hmm, is this really the best way of doing this? I ended up using 120 Rank D magic stones. But before anything else...Hooray for getting my first Rank B magic stone!'

After much trial and error, Allen had finally succeeded in clearing an orc village all by himself.

The first attempt had taught him that slowly pushing in from the front gate was a bad idea, as it gave the orcs time to set up formations and drag things into a war of attrition, gradually wearing each side out. Based on this lesson, he had changed up his tactics.

First, he arranged forty Beast Ds into four groups of ten each and made them attack the orc village from all four directions at the same time. If each Beast D could kill two orcs using the element of surprise, that was eighty orcs down before they could even react. Suddenly lowering their numbers so drastically proved an effective way to prevent them from forming up.

Then he used Sharing to remotely control four Beast Ds to target the magic-using orcs. Just in case, he had also instructed the other Summons to prioritize killing the magic-users should the opportunity present itself.

The rest was simple, no matter how many Summons went down and no matter if an orc king came out or not. In short, he just continued calling out as many Summons as needed to overwhelm the enemy through sheer numbers.

With Allen himself taking up position somewhere out of harm's way, victory was simply a matter of time.

Just now, Allen had just proved the efficacy of this new strategy.

'I did end up using quite a few magic stones, but now I know I do have the ability and resources to win. I may have failed in my blind playthrough, but now I have got this.'

In Allen's previous life, playing a game without any prior knowledge was called "doing a blind playthrough." Failure was a very common element in these playthroughs. What was most important was the ability to learn from past mistakes to pull off a better run next time.

'All right, now that I'm able to clear an orc village alone, it's time to shift focus to improving efficiency.'

Thus began Allen's campaign to exterminate all the orc villages at the foothills of the White Dragon Mountains.